‘Alaska’ is being billed as a part travelogue, part documentary series. Mark Burnett, the svengali behind ‘Survivor,’ will produce. Filming is set to start this the summer, and the final result will air on Discovery’s satellite channel TLC, at a date to be determined later.

There will be eight episodes in all, with a budgeted cost of about $1 million per episode.

Details are sketchy but what’s clear is what ‘Alaska’ will not be. It will not be the Palin family version of ‘Keeping Up with the Kardashians,’ and it won’t be a Palin-esque spin on ‘Jon & Kate Plus Eight.’ It’s being promoted as a straight travelogue, like ‘Over British Columbia,’ but with the former Alaska state governor as host.

Here are 15 other fun facts about what ‘Sarah Palin’s Alaska’ might entail.

• A reality TV show set in Alaska adds whole new meaning to the term “Hollywood North.”

• That title ain’t so bad. It could have been ‘Woman vs. Wild.’

• It’s eight episodes, people, not 80. Count your blessings.

• TLC was originally called The Learning Channel. There’s still a whole lot of learnin’ goin’ on over there, evidently.

• ‘Sarah Palin’s Alaska’ is not reality TV’s first venture to the U.S.’s northernmost state. In 2002, ‘Looking for Love: Bachelorettes in Alaska’ followed a gaggle of husband-seeking men north of the 58th parallel in search of true love with a real man. Sadly, they all went home empty-handed. As the philosopher Mick Jagger famously noted, you can’t always get what you want.

• ‘Sarah Palin’s Alaska’ will deliver a lot more than the title promises. Now, you’ll not only be able to see a TV travelogue about Alaska; you’ll get to see a TV travelogue about Russia as well. Two for the price of one.

• Palin shares the same surname as Michael Palin, the great BBC explorer, travel documentary filmmaker, one of the founding members of the Monty Python comedy troupe and current president of Britain’s Royal Geographical Society. How can you go wrong?

• Discovery’s COO said ‘Alaska’ will “reveal Alaska’s powerful beauty as has never been filmed . . . as told by one of the state’s proudest daughters.” Sadly, the Anchorage Daily News doesn’t seem to share Discovery’s enthusiasm. “Is Palin’s reality TV gambit worth the risk?” read a heading on the newspaper’s website Thursday.

• ‘Sarah Palin’s Alaska’ qualifies as “feel-good” programming because, as she’s famously stated in the past, the cause of global warming “kinda doesn’t matter.” Who needs a downer when they flip on the TV?

• Look on the bright side of climate change. Coming soon: Tea plantations in Alaska.

• Palin’s “going Hollywood” will give Jon Stewart something to get exercised about all over again. When he returns from vacation, that is.

• If ‘Sarah Palin’s Alaska’ shows it has legs, it could prove a perfect companion series for TLC’s ‘Police Women of Broward County.’

• As that late-night sage Craig Ferguson pointed out recently, critics who say Palin can’t last on TV because she’s “an over-emotional woman who gets her facts wrong” are themselves wrong. After all, as Ferguson noted, it’s working great for Glenn Beck, so what the heck?

• ‘Sarah Palin’s Alaska’ hails from Mark Burnett, producer of a show called ‘Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?’ Discuss.

National TV columnist for Postmedia News Network.
Two solitudes:
“My dream is to have a bank of TVs where all the different channels are on at the same time and I can be monitoring them,” the social... read more critic Camille Paglia told Wired magazine, back in the day, before Big Brother and before Survivor. “I love the tabloid stuff. The trashier the program is, the more I feel it’s TV.”
And then there’s this, from Gilligan’s Island creator Sherwood Schwartz: “There’s a lot of underlying philosophy to the characters on Gilligan’s Island. They’re really a metaphor for the nations of the world, and their purpose was to show how nations have to get along together . . . or cease to exist.”
There you have it, then. The trashier a program is, the more it’s like TV. Or, if you prefer, TV is a metaphor for the nations of the world, and Gilligan’s Island was really a message about why we don’t all get along.
That’s where I come in.
My first TV memory was of being menaced by a Dalek on Doctor Who — the original, scratchy, black-and-white Who.
My more recent TV memories include the Sopranos finale; 9/11; Elvis Costello’s first appearance (and temporary banishment) on Saturday Night Live; what was really inside the Erlenmeyer flask in The X-Files; Law & Order (the original, and those iconic chimes); glued to the set at 3am local time during the 2003 war in Iraq — TV’s first real-time war —and Bart Simpson scrawling on the chalkboard in The Simpsons’ opening credits: “I Must Not Write All Over the Walls.”
Other Bart-isms, as seen on that TV chalkboard over the years: “I Will Never Win an Emmy,” “I No Longer Want My MTV,” and, pointedly — if a little hopefully — “Network TV is Not Dead.”
I was there to witness "the new dawn of the sitcom" in the mid-1990s, followed — inevitably — by the glut of terrible sitcoms in the early naughts, a glut that led, directly and indirectly, to the rise of reality TV.
There’s been a lot to talk about — good, bad and indifferent — about TV over the years.
That’s where you, and this space, come in. Read on. Enjoy, feel free to agree, disagree and dispute whenever you want. TV may be ugly at times, but it's a mirror of democracy in action. A funhouse mirror at times, a sober reflection at others.View author's profile